How Do Sins Against the Eucharist Cause Our Lord to Suffer?

On June 16, 1675, Our Lord said to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque at Paray-le-Monial:

I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.

It has never been a matter of doubt that the Lord Jesus can be sinned against in the Holy Eucharist in a variety of ways — unbelief, indifference, the contempt of irreverence, reception in a state of mortal sin, sacrilege — and that He is rightly offended by these actions, for human sin and divine righteousness cannot cohabitate. As Cardinal Ratzinger exclaimed in his 2005 Via Crucis in Rome:

Should we not also think of how much Christ suffers in his own Church? How often is the Holy Sacrament of his Presence abused, how often must he enter empty and evil hearts! How often do we celebrate only ourselves, without even realizing that he is there! How often is his Word twisted and misused! What little faith is present behind so many theories, so many empty words! How much filth there is in the Church, and even among those who, in the priesthood, ought to belong entirely to him! How much pride, how much self-complacency!

What we read of the Israelites in the Book of Numbers may be applied to the faithful who act unfaithfully: “Behold, we perish, we are undone, we are all undone. Everyone who comes near . . . shall die” (Num 17:12–13). The Eucharist is the sacrament of the Lord’s Passion. Those who approach and receive worthily are united to His mystical death and receive some share of its fruits; those who receive unworthily die the death of compounded mortal sin. All who come near can be said to die — some in order to live forever, and some, to incur the danger of dying forever (cf. Rev 20:6).

A much more difficult question arises, however, when we ask whether it is possible to say that Our Lord suffers when He is thus sinned against. Many such texts, from private revelations and from the works of theologians and spiritual writers, can be collated, all claiming that He can — as, for example, in St. John Vianney’s remarks about how an unworthy communicant crucifies the Lord again. To put the question more precisely: is there a way in which Our Lord may be said to suffer now, after His resurrection, by the things we do to His Most Holy Sacrament?

On the one hand, we know that Christ, having conquered sin and death, is no longer subject to suffering in His glorified state. The Protestant troops who desecrated hosts during the Reformation, trampling them underfoot or feeding them to the beasts, did not diminish Jesus, did not lessen His perfection or His glory; rather, the troops made themselves guilty of a horrendous crime for which they would have to suffer either in this life or in the next. On the other hand, in many approved private revelations over the span of many centuries, beginning in the Middle Ages and coming down to our own times, the Lord says that the sins of men cause Him to grieve, sorrow, and suffer. We must accept this as true in a mysterious way that we will never fully grasp in this life.

Bishop Athanasius Schneider weighed in on this question in the text of his “Sins Against the Blessed Sacrament and the Need of a Crusade of Eucharistic Reparation,” which was published many places online (e.g., here) and which was also published an an appendix to my book The Holy Bread of Eternal Life: Restoring Eucharistic Reverence in an Age of Impiety (Sophia, 2020). His Excellency writes, inter alia:

To say that the Lord is not suffering because of the outrages committed against Him in the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist can lead to a minimizing of the great atrocities committed. Some people say: God is offended by the abuse of the Blessed Sacrament, but the Lord does not personally suffer. This is, however, theologically and spiritually too narrow a view. Although Christ is now in His glorious state and hence no more subject to suffering in a human way, He nevertheless is affected and touched in His Sacred Heart by the abuses and outrages against the Divine majesty and the immensity of His Love in the Blessed Sacrament….
          Frère Michel de la Sainte Trinité gave a profound theological explanation of the meaning of the “suffering” or “sadness” of God because of the offenses that sinners commit against Him: “This ‘suffering,’ this ‘sadness’ of the Heavenly Father, or of Jesus since His Ascension, are to be understood analogically. They are not suffered passively as with us, but on the contrary freely willed and chosen as the ultimate expression of Their mercy towards sinners called to conversion. They are only a manifestation of God’s love for sinners, a love which is sovereignly free and gratuitous, and which is not irrevocable.”
          This analogical spiritual meaning of the “sadness” or the “suffering” of Jesus in the Eucharistic mystery is confirmed by the words of the Angel in his apparition in 1916 to the children of Fatima and especially by the words and the example of the life of St. Francisco Marto. The children were invited by the Angel to make reparation for offenses against the Eucharistic Jesus and to console Him, as we can read in the memoirs of Sister Lucia: “…He gave the Host to me, and to Jacinta and Francisco he gave the contents of the chalice to drink, saying as he did so: ‘Take and drink the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, horribly outraged by ungrateful men. Repair their crimes and console your God.’”…
          Jesus Christ continues in a mysterious way his Passion in Gethsemane throughout the ages in the mystery of His Church and also in the Eucharistic mystery, the mystery of His immense Love. Well-known is the expression of Blaise Pascal: ‘Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time.’… Jesus Christ in the Eucharistic mystery is not indifferent and insensitive towards the behavior which men show in His regard in this Sacrament of Love. Christ is present in this Sacrament also with His soul, which is hypostatically united with His Divine Person…. “Christ in the sacramental state sees and in a certain divine way perceives all the thoughts and affections, the worship, the homages and also the insults and sins of all men in general, of all his faithful specifically and his priests in particular; He perceives homages and sins that directly refer to this ineffable mystery of love” (Cardinal Franzelin).

Let it not be said that such language is exaggerated, sentimental, or imprecise. The mysteries of the life, death, and resurrection of Christ endure as long as His glorified humanity endures, which is to say, forever; and our behavior toward the Sacrament is our way of receiving Him or rejecting Him (cf. Prologue of St. John’s Gospel), of entering with love into His Passion, as did St. John at the Last Supper and upon the hill of Golgotha, or, conversely, of turning our backs to Him in company with Judas and the high priests, clamoring: “Crucify Him! Crucify Him!” We are all present to His soul and all have an effect on His soul.

All the sins that men have committed or will commit from the beginning of time until the end of time were distinctly present to Our Lord’s mind and heart throughout His Passion, from the Garden of Gethsemane until He breathed His last  upon the Cross, and therefore He has truly received injury and suffered pain from each of our sins, until the present order of creation shall be no more. Through the perfections of His human intellect (beatific and infused knowledge), Our Lord had knowledge of men’s sins, whenever they had been or would be committed, and for each sin He suffered pain. 

What St. Alphonsus says in his traditional Stations of the Cross, viz., that it is my sins that are driving in the nails, etc., is therefore perfectly correct: the mystical reality of this Passion — in its source, which is the charity of His heart; in its effect, which is our redemption; in its primary external sign, His wounds — remains present and active for all eternity. For Christ as our High Priest is “always living to make intercession for us” (Heb 7:25).

Moreover, we may say that Christ’s power of memory, being hypostatically united to a divine Person, has a greater depth and intensity than even our primary experience, dulled as it is by the limits of our nature and of our fallen condition. His ever-living memory of His Passion is more intensely real than the experience of the same suffering and death would have been to any other human being. Could we not say that Christ’s memory of His suffering during His mortal life is more truly called suffering than our actual sufferings are? And if this is true, would they not deserve the strongest words we could give them? Yet this point could be argued against by stating that the mere memory of suffering (as St Thomas points out in speaking about the causes of pleasure) seems rather a cause for happiness, if the suffering itself has passed by.

A theologian suggested to me the following (admittedly highly speculative) possibility. We know that the possession of the beatific vision would “normally” render the possessor immune to all pain and all sadness, and yet that during His earthy life our Lord prevented the beatific vision from producing all its effects in His soul, for the sake of the Redemption. Is it impossible that in heaven, out of charity, and to provoke our charity, Christ allows some part of His soul still not to benefit from the normal effect of the beatific vision, so that there may be still some drop of sorrow, of want, in the midst of the joy of heaven? Might the same be the case for the Blessed Virgin, since private revelations seem to speak of her in very much the same way?

I conclude once more with words by Cardinal Ratzinger in his Via Crucis meditations:

His betrayal by his disciples, their unworthy reception of his Body and Blood, is certainly the greatest suffering endured by the Redeemer; it pierces his heart. We can only call to him from the depths of our hearts: Kyrie eleison — Lord, save us.

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Our Lord’s Request for the Institution of the Feast of His Sacred Heart

The devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus has deep roots; texts can be found in the ancient and medieval periods that speak of the love of His wounded and glorious Heart, and of the appropriate response of adoring love we should make to Him.

However, the devotion in the form more familiar to Catholics today is traceable to the private revelations made by Our Lord Jesus Christ to St Margaret Mary Alacoque in the later 17th century. The content of these revelations was written down for her spiritual director, St Claude de la Colombiere, and are widely available (see, e.g., here).

A priest mentioned to me a detail that had previously escaped my notice. When Our Lord appeared to St Margaret Mary on June 16, 1675, to request the institution of a feast in honor of His Sacred Heart, He spoke as follows:

I ask of you that the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi be set apart for a special Feast to honor My Heart, by communicating on that day, and making reparation to It by a solemn act, in order to make amends for the indignities which It has received during the time It has been exposed on the altars. I promise you that My Heart shall expand Itself to shed in abundance the influence of Its divine love upon those who shall thus honor It, and cause It to be honored.

The very Son of God — God from God, Light from Light, Word Incarnate, Eternal High Priest, Head of the Mystical Body, Creator, Savior, and Judge of the universe — refers as a matter of course to the “Octave of Corpus Christi” and places His request for a special feast precisely in this context. Moreover, He specifically asks that the feast be one of reparation, and that this reparation be connected with the extended Eucharistic adoration during the Octave of Corpus Christi. Finally, He promises to shed His divine love on those who shall thus honor His Heart, that is, honor It in the manner He has explained.

Is it not disturbing, then, to think of liturgical reformers under Pius XII simply chucking out this Octave of Corpus Christi, which had endured from the time of its widespread observance in the 14th century until 1955, at which time all octaves were abolished except those of Christmas, Easter, and Pentecost? [1] The invisible supreme Head of the Church endorsed this octave and made His requests based on it, but no matter; committees know better, and popes always know better, as we can see today.

Although the feast of the Sacred Heart always possessed a reparatory character, this was underlined by the new Mass and Office for the feast promulgated by Pius XI in 1928, to replace the Mass and Office first approved by Clement XIII in 1765, and extended to the universal Church in 1856. For 41 years, this Collect, which so aptly mirrors Our Lord’s request, was recited at Mass:

O God, Who in the Heart of Thy Son, wounded by our sins, dost mercifully vouchsafe to bestow upon us the infinite wealth of Thy love; grant, we beseech Thee, that revering It with meet devotion, we may fulfil our duty of worthy reparation. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ…

Moreover, the Postcommunion prays for detachment from worldly goods and attachment to heavenly ones, a petition characteristic of the usus antiquior in general, and fitting for this feast in particular, which is very much about the truth “where your heart is, there your treasure is also”:

May Thy holy mysteries, O Lord Jesus, produce in us a divine fervour, whereby, having tasted the sweetness of Thy most dear Heart, we may learn to despise earthly things and love those of heaven: Who livest and reigneth.

In contrast, the Novus Ordo Collect borrows some of its phrasing from Clement XIII, while recasting it in a more generic Christological way that does not emphasize the rationale behind the institution of the feast:

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that we, who glory in the Heart of your beloved Son and recall the wonders of his love for us, may be made worthy to receive an overflowing measure of grace from that fount of heavenly gifts. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son…

Happily, the Collect of Pius XI was added back as an option in the most recent edition of the Pauline missal, which will bring it back into circulation to some extent. The Postcommunion, regrettably, excises the unfashionable sentiment discamus terrena despicere, et amare caelestia, and, recasts the prayer to the Father, due to the subordinationist principle that we must nearly always address the Father rather than the Son in our public prayer:

May this sacrament of charity, O Lord, make us fervent with the fire of holy love, so that, drawn always to your Son, we may learn to see him in our neighbor. Through Christ our Lord.

As a friend commented on this prayer, “All man, all the time.” As Gaudium et Spes 12 begins, “According to the almost unanimous opinion of believers and unbelievers alike, all things on earth should be related to man as their center and crown.”

In 1904, Pope St Pius X added the threefold invocation Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis to the already-existing Leonine prayers after Low Mass. In 1964, the Instruction Inter Oecumenici abolished all of the prayers after Mass. For sixty years, Catholics on every continent, of every culture, in every conceivable situation, prayed, “Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, have mercy on us.” But this was, one supposes, just another of those useless repetitions that had to be purged for the benefit of . . .

Come to think of it, cui bono? Why was the character of the feast tilted away from the theme of reparation to the Sacred Heart of Jesus for sins, blasphemies, outrages, sacrileges, indifference, and worldliness? Why was the octave of Corpus Christi abolished, depriving the Church and the world of more solemn, calendrically set-apart opportunities to adore the Lord with Eucharistic adoration, exposition, and procession? Why did we abandon the humble collective invocations that united us to one another and to the merciful God at the end of Low Mass?

Indeed, the very Offertory of the Mass in which the priest says that he is offering sacrifice for his sins, offenses, and negligences, as also for the welfare of the living and the dead, was abolished, as was the Placeat tibi at the end of Mass:

May the homage of my bounden duty be pleasing to Thee, O Holy Trinity; and grant that the sacrifice which I, though unworthy, have offered in the sight of Thy Majesty may be acceptable to Thee, and through Thy mercy be a propitiation for me and for all those for whom I have offered it. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

What benefit did the reformers under Pius XII and Paul VI think they were bringing to the Church by removing so many references to the “sins, offenses, and negligences” for which we are called upon to make reparation?

On a good day in October 1946, a day when chopping off digits and limbs from the liturgical calendar wasn’t on the agenda, Pius XII said, “Perhaps the greatest sin in the world today is that men have begun to lose the sense of sin.” Whatever else may be said, this much is clear: the changes to the liturgy have not helped us regain it.

Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.
Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.
Cor Iesu Sacratissimum, miserere nobis.

NOTE

[1] As the incomparable St. Andrew Daily Missal of 1945 tells us on p. 782: “To resist the attacks of renewed heresies against the Holy Eucharist and to revive in the Church a zeal which had somewhat grown cold, the Holy Ghost inspired, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the solemnity of Corpus Christi. In 1208, the blessed Juliana of Mount Cornillon, near Liège, saw in a vision the full moon with an indentation indicating that a feast was missing in the liturgical cycle. . . . It was thought that immediately after Paschaltide a feast with an octave should be established. As the Last Supper took place on Thursday, the Bishop of Liège instituted in 1246 this solemnity in his diocese on the Thursday which follows the octave of Pentecost. In 1264, Pope Urban IV extended this feast to the whole world.”

This commentary brings several truths to mind: first, that the Holy Spirit is the principal agent of organic liturgical development, who also inspires the conservation of that which has been established; second, that the double fittingness of a Thursday feast followed by an octave was intuitively grasped, precisely because of the need to resist heresy and rekindle fervor; third, that if this feast was needed by medieval Catholics, a fortiori it is needed by Catholics today, who are facing heresy, apostasy, and indifference several magnitudes greater; fourth, that the Church observed this Corpus Christi octave for between 500 and 700 years (depending on the region, as the feast was of variable diffusion), before Pius XII unceremoniously scrapped the octave and later bishops bumped it to a Sunday (I refer not to the concept of a so-called “external solemnity,” but of a simple switch from the proper day to the nearest Sunday, thereby effectively surrendering to the Protestant conception of the secular work week). The changes offer another a textbook example of how badly mistaken recent popes and liturgists have been in “interpreting the signs of the times.”

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